More Readers Picking Up Electronic Books — Could book lovers finally be willing to switch from pages to pixels? — For a decade, consumers mostly ignored electronic book devices, which were often hard to use and offered few good things to read. But this year, thanks in part to the popularity …

More than 1 Million Ways to Infect Your Computer — An unknown hacker has been on a Search Engine Optimization rampage to flood search engines with more than a million ways to infect yourself with his virus. This is the first major “Scareware” infection we've seen since writing …

iPhone fart app pulls in nearly $10,000 a day — Apple's App Store is currently experiencing a plague of fart applications. Last week, I detailed one day in which at least 14 new fart apps were accepted into the store. And now upon a quick search, it looks like there are something around 50 apps …

Adult FriendFinder Files To Go Public — Florida-based FriendFinder Networks (formerly Penthouse Media Group), a group of sites that includes Penthouse and Adult FriendFinder, has filed a registration statement with the SEC to go public. — Little known Russian investment bank Renaissance Capital is representing them in the deal.

Merb gets merged into Rails 3! — It's christmas, baby, and do we have a present for you. We're ending the bickering between Merb and Rails with a this bombshell: Merb is being merged into Rails 3! — We all realized that working together for a common good would be much more productive …

Facebook Bails on Project Playlist, Too — Four days after MySpace cut the legs out from under Project Playlist by disabling the music streaming service's app, Facebook is following suit. Here's the official statement from Facebook PR: … The only surprise here is that it took Facebook …

Dell's MacBook Air Rival Confirmed by . . . Dell — CLARIFICATION 5:55 p.m. - The story below references a Dell ad placed in UptownLife magazine. The online version of that ad, which has since been removed, appeared to include both an image from Dell and text.

Will Microsoft throw in the towels? — Google, Microsoft and other big tech companies spent the past few years ramping up employee perks as they battled each other for top talent. Now, as the tech industry tries to weather the economic storm, the fate of those extras will be an interesting barometer …

Reboot the FCC — We'll stifle the Skypes and YouTubes of the future if we don't demolish the regulators that oversee our digital pipelines. — Economic growth requires innovation. Trouble is, Washington is practically designed to resist it. Built into the DNA of the most important agencies created …

iPhone claims high-ranking spot on Flickr … The iPhone is the mobile device of choice these days for doing most things that need a network. So it shouldn't be a surprise that the phone has carved out a prominent place on Yahoo's photo-sharing site, Flickr.

HP Firebird 803 tower with VoodooDNA leaked! — We always loved us that Voodoo-designed HP Blackbird 002, but it was certainly a behemoth. Now it looks like the duo are going for a more realistic size — and hopefully pricepoint — with the all-new HP Firebird PC 803 that just fell in our lap …

‘New’ iMacs to begin shipping in January — We were pretty sure we'd see upgraded iMacs introduced at Macworld, but according to the Chinese-language Economic Daily News (EDN) via Digitimes: — .. sources inside the component supply chain as saying that Apple plans to launch a new iMac …

Looking for a Few Good Answers Online — Why is the sky blue? How do you bleach a stained shirt? Why does cheese smell? — The answers to these questions used to be sought in encyclopedias and other reference books. Now, we increasingly seek the answers to such questions online …

Fennec Alpha 2 — We're happy to announce that our second alpha release of Fennec has come together. While we focused much of the previous alpha on getting the user experience how we wanted, we've spent much of the time since focused on improving performance.

Online Shopping Pops 98% Last Xmas Weekend — Online analytics firm comScore (SCOR) today released numbers for holiday online shopping activity in the U.S., and it looks as though cold weather that kept people indoors and online in some places provided one bright little sliver of hope.